House approves a transportation transformation (Boston Globe)Restructuring bill still faces changes
By Noah Bierman -- The Massachusetts House of Representatives approved a bill late last night to eliminate the Massachusetts Turnpike Authority and reorganize the rest of the state transportation system, paving the way for a debate on increasing the state gas tax. The wide-ranging bill would change the working conditions and fringe benefits for thousands of state workers, putting the transit system and most state highways under a single authority.

Walk this way (Boston Globe)It's healthy, green, and in fashion. Just how walkable is your neighborhood?
By Kathleen Burge -- If you live on one of the short streets that loop around Lexington Center, you can easily walk to nearly everything you might desire: food (Super Stop & Shop), a drug store (Theatre Pharmacy), caffeine (Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts), a movie theater, a gym, a shoe store, a library, and plenty of restaurants and bars.

Cottage Farms neighbors put brakes on Carlton Street bike plans (Brookline TAB)
By Neal Simpson -- BROOKLINE -- Cottage Farms is a neighborhood bound on all sides by bicycle routes. To the north and south of the tiny historic district, brand-new bike lanes on Beacon Street and Commonwealth Avenue have invited swarms of new bicyclists to join the commute. And soon, proposed bike lanes on the Boston University Bridge will draw even more. But now Cottage Farms neighbors are putting the brakes on a plan to create yet another bike route through the middle of their neighborhood, on a street that — by some counts —is already one of the most heavily traveled bike route in Brookline.Related:

Opinion: Safe bike route to the Charles is a small price for a big benefit (Brookline TAB)

Museum-market building proposed alongside Greenway (Boston Globe)
By Casey Ross -- A $120 million museum and food market would be built along the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway under a plan to transform streets near Faneuil Hall Marketplace and the MBTA's Haymarket Station into an arts and culture district.

News From New York: The ABC's of Trial Plazas and Complete Streets (Streetsblog SF)
By Matthew Roth -- When we wrote about the trial pedestrian plaza on 17th Street and Market Street that DPW expects to start this May, the story generated numerous doubts about how the city would create a successful public space out of a busy street abutting a gas station. [...] Though we can't make guarantees on a pilot project that hasn't been built, we thought we'd highlight some of New York City's temporary plazas and street treatments as best practice analogs, knowing our DPW and MTA are also looking to the Big Crabapple for inspiration.

'Job sprawl' threatens urban poor, study says (Philadelphia Inquirer)
By Diane Mastrull -- Against the drumbeat of distressing reports about job loss in America comes a gloomy assessment today about a time when jobs were being created. Between 1998 and 2006, nearly all U.S. metropolitan areas - including Philadelphia's - experienced a drop in downtown employment as jobs migrated to the suburbs, in many cases out of the reach of city residents without cars or other means of getting to them, according to the Brookings Institution.

"Streets"

Stop littering the sidewalks, South End residents urge, as street cleaning returns (South End News)